Forget Bimodal – Hybrid IT is Multi-modal

Hybrid IT is often referred to as bimodal, a term coined by Gartner some four years ago to reflect the (then) new need for the simultaneous management of two distinct strands of work in a Hybrid IT environment – the traditional server-based elements on the one hand, and the Cloud elements on the other.

Since then, the two strands of the bimodal world have blended in various different ways. As they have engaged and experimented with new technologies, organisations have found that certain workload types are particularly suited to certain environments.

For example, DevOps work, with its strong focus on user experience elements such as web front ends, is typically well suited to cloud-native environments. Meanwhile, back end applications processing data tend to reside most comfortably in the traditional data centre environment.

The result is a multi-modal situation even within any given application, with its various tiers sitting in different technologies, or even different clouds or data centres.

The obvious question for IT management is this: how on earth do you manage an application which is split across multiple distinct technologies? Relying on technology to provide the management visibility you need drives you to traditional tools for the elements of the application based on traditional server technology, and DevOps tools for the cloud native side. Both sets of tools need to be continuously monitored. For every application, and every environment.

A new breed of tools is emerging, allowing you to play in both worlds at once . VMware vRealize Automation cloud automation software is a good example. Over the last three years, VMware has developed its long-standing traditional platform, adding Docker container capabilities, so that today vRealize is a wholly integrated platform allowing for the creation of fully hybrid applications, in the form of ‘cut-out’ blueprints containing both traditional VM images and Docker images.

This multi-modal Hybrid IT world is where every enterprise will end up. IT management needs clear visibility, for every application, of multiple tiers across multiple technologies – for security, scaling, cost management and risk management, to name just a few issues. Platforms with the capability to manage this hybrid application state will be essential.

This area of enterprise IT is moving rapidly: Logicalis is well versed, and experienced, in these emerging technologies both in terms of solution and service delivery, and in terms of support for these technologies in our own cloud. Contact us to find out more about multi-modal Hybrid IT and how we can help you leverage it.

Looking at emerging technologies and market trends, he drives the direction of the Logicalis Hybrid IT portfolio. He also works closely with customers, helping them understand what's available and how they could benefit.

Neil has worked with Logicalis since 1997, in roles including network management pre-sales support, and management roles in datacentre infrastructure technologies, application performance management and traffic shaping.

He is fascinated by all aspects of software defined infrastructure and automation.

As the benefits of hybrid IT have become clear, it has evolved from a temporary state to the chosen environment for many organisations looking to thrive.

Every organisation, regardless of size or sector, has a digital strategy. In fact, it’s hard to believe that IT once lingered on the fringes of business operations and decisions when today it is front and centre – a driving force behind both individual projects and overall business objectives.

And for the vast majority of organisations, it’s difficult to speak about digital strategy without mentioning cloud.

In fact, cloud’s ever-growing role and potential benefits are so widely publicised that it can feel almost unavoidable. After all, if your competitors adopt ‘cloud first’ strategies and you chose not to- don’t you risk getting left behind?

But, cloud doesn’t have to be all or nothing…

Enter hybrid IT

With hybrid IT, organisations can bring in cloud-based services that will run in parallel with their existing on-premise hardware. This may not necessarily be a new concept. However, its full potential is rarely realised.

Instead, more often than not, hybrid IT is built into digital strategies as a stepping stone to cloud and, as such, considered the transitional phase on a much bigger journey. It’s useful, but it’s also temporary… Simply a vehicle to get you and your organisation where you need to be by enabling you to join the elite and become a ‘cloud first’ company.

And it’s true, hybrid IT is a very useful tool for organisations looking to make the first small steps into a new cloud-centric world. You can test the waters by investing in new cloud-based technologies, without being all-in.

But hybrid IT can also open up the door to a whole new world of possibilities, enabling businesses to operate in- and therefore reap the benefits associated with- both on-premise and cloud environments.

The best of both worlds

Traditional IT or cloud technologies… it used to be a one-stop choice that organisations had to make. And once you made it, all your application workloads and databases were assigned to one environment. You were effectively tied into that environment until you actively decided to change and, with significant effort and probably financial cost, you made steps to convert.

But, by using hybrid IT, organisations no longer have to commit to a single environment. They can have the best of both worlds and benefit from aligning specific workloads and applications to specific platforms. hybrid IT grants:

The scalability and cost efficiency of cloud technologies

There’s no doubt about it, scaling a traditional infrastructure can be very expensive. By making the most of hybrid IT- and utilising the public cloud and private cloud environments, businesses can upscale IT operations quickly and at minimal cost – which is particularly useful for shorter-term projects. But, it doesn’t stop there… with hybrid IT, organisations can also downscale their operations. In effect, everything can be driven to reflect the actual demands being placed upon the business, saving both resource and money.

And if organisations are saving resource in those areas, it leaves more room for innovation. The exciting new projects that often have to be pushed aside due to more pressing concerns, such as keeping the lights on, can become a reality.

Hybrid IT is also often used in disaster recovery strategies. In our digital world, suffering an IT outage is every organisation’s worst nightmare. Why? Because the downtime that organisations suffer as a result can have a devastating and lasting impact, both financially and in terms of future reputation. By having primary data copied and stored in two different locations, organisations can recover faster while keeping downtime to a minimum.

Above all, hybrid IT gives organisations the freedom to make their own choices. It merges the best of old world technology with new world thinking. And, just as digital is no longer the sole territory of IT departments, it’s set to infiltrate the boardroom and play a key role in all future business decisions.

After all, hybrid IT is an enabler, allowing business leaders to make the right digital decision for their business, whether that is traditional IT, cloud-based technologies or a mixture of the two.

Contact us to find out more about Hybrid IT and how we can help you leverage it

The explosive growth of Cloud computing in recent years has opened up diverse opportunities for both new and established businesses. However, it has also driven the rise of a multitude of ‘islands of innovation’. With each island needing its own service management, data protection and other specialists, IT departments find themselves wrestling with increased – and increasing – management complexity and cost.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and with cost and complexity becoming increasingly problematic, attitudes to Cloud are changing. Organisations are moving selected tools, resources and services back to on-premises deployment models: we’re seeing the rise of the Hybrid Cloud environment.

The trend towards Hybrid Cloud is driven by an absolute need for operational and service consistency, regardless of the on-premises/Cloud deployment mix – a single set of automation platforms, a single set of operational tools and a single set of policies. We’re looking at a change in ethos, away from multiple islands of innovation, each with its own policies, processes and tools, to a single tool kit – a single way of working – that we can apply to all our workloads and data, regardless of where they actually reside.

Disparate islands in the Cloud have also increasingly put CIOs in the unenviable position of carrying the responsibility for managing and controlling IT but without the capability and authority to do so. Many organisations have experimented (some might say dabbled) with cherry-picked service management frameworks such as ITIL.

With focus shifting to Hybrid Cloud, we’re now seeing greater interest in more pragmatic ITSM frameworks, such as IT4IT, pushing responsibility up the stack and facilitating the move to something more akin to supply chain management than pure hardware, software and IT services management.

There are two key pieces to the Hybrid IT puzzle. On the one hand, there’s the workload: the actual applications and services. On the other, there’s the data. The data is where the value is – the critical component, to be exploited and protected. Workloads, however, can be approached in a more brokered manner.

Properly planned and executed, Hybrid Cloud allows the enterprise to benefit from the best of both the on-premises world and the Cloud world. The ability to select the best environment for each tool, service and resource – a mix which will be different in different industries, and even in different businesses within the same industry – delivers significant benefits in terms of cost, agility, flexibility and scalability.

Key to this is a comprehensive understanding of where you are and where you want to be, before you start putting policies or technology in place. The Logicalis Hybrid IT Workshop can help enormously with this, constructing a clear view of where you are now, and where you want to be.

In the workshop we assess your top applications and services, where they reside and how they’re used in your business. We then look at where you want to get to. Do you want to own your assets, or not? Do you want to take a CAPEX route or an OPEX route? Do you have an inherent Cloud First strategy? What are your licensing issues?

We then use our own analysis tools, developed from our real world experience with customers, to create visualisations showing where you are today, where you want to eventually be and our recommended plan to bridge the gap, in terms of people, processes, technology and phases.

Hybrid Cloud offers significant benefits, but needs to be carefully planned and executed. To find out more about how Logicalis can help, see our website or call us on +44 (0)1753 77720.

Nature Rara has a balance, yin and yang, where apparent opposite forces complement each other. This is the goal of the hybrid IT to blend the wholesale nba jerseys apparent opposites of in-house IT and public clouds and deliver seamless services to end users. This can be achieved by delivering the right mix of on premise and cloud services, 2 with consistent operational management, automation, security and service management across them.

Sitting in-between on premise and cloud infrastructures and the delivered services is a software layer – the hybrid IT operating system. This ‘operating system’ includes the software-defined data centre, the policy-based and self-service automation platform and the telemetry for analytics, security and service management platforms. What hybrid IT operating system you choose depends on your ideology.

The first ideology is ‘push’. Push says that you take the technologies, skills, processes and tools that you operate wholesale jerseys on premise and you try and replicate those in the cloud. This enables a hybrid IT transition, rather than transformation. If you use VMware virtualisation on premise this would mean using a VMware-based public clouds (such as Logicalis Optimal Cloud, IBM Bluemix or VMware on AWS in 2017) and VMware cross-cloud services across these environments (such as cross-cloud vMotion).

The second ideology is ‘pull’. Pull says that you They take the technologies that the cloud operates and you replicate those on premise and refresh your skills, processes and tools accordingly. This requires a transformation, which itself presents an wholesale mlb jerseys opportunity to review and modernise your processes and tools. If you invest heavily in Microsoft this could mean using Azure cloud and platform services and then implementing Azure _ Stack and Hyper-V on premise and using Azure Portal to manage everything.

There’s no right or wrong ideology – each has its own benefits and drawbacks. The reasons for choosing one way over the other include cost and risk but also the expected mix of on premise and cloud based services – for be example, cheap jerseys if you expect to 2010 have >50% on premise infrastructure then Hospital push is potentially more advantageous – and vice versa.

What’s clear is that hybrid IT is the future state of IT. Regulations, security, bespoke workloads, etc will always err towards on premise services, whilst digital users and lines of business will gravitate towards the on-demand, elastic, pay-as-you-go cloud. Hybrid IT is required to blend these services together, delivering these in a consistent approach will drive operational, service and cost efficiencies. All you need to ask yourself is ‘push’ or ‘pull’?

As the benefits of hybrid IT have become clear, it has evolved from a temporary state to the chosen environment for many organisations looking to thrive.

Every organisation, regardless of size or sector, has a digital strategy. In fact, it’s hard to believe that IT once lingered on the fringes of business operations and decisions when today it is front and centre – a driving force behind both individual projects and overall business objectives.

And for the vast majority of organisations, it’s difficult to speak about digital strategy without mentioning cloud.

In fact, cloud’s ever-growing role and potential benefits are so widely publicised that it can feel almost unavoidable. After all, if your competitors adopt ‘cloud first’ strategies and you chose not to- don’t you risk getting left behind?

But, cloud doesn’t have to be all or nothing…

Enter hybrid IT

With hybrid IT, organisations can bring in cloud-based services that will run in parallel with their existing on-premise hardware. This may not necessarily be a new concept. However, its full potential is rarely realised.

Instead, more often than not, hybrid IT is built into digital strategies as a stepping stone to cloud and, as such, considered the transitional phase on a much bigger journey. It’s useful, but it’s also temporary… Simply a vehicle to get you and your organisation where you need to be by enabling you to join the elite and become a ‘cloud first’ company.

And it’s true, hybrid IT is a very useful tool for organisations looking to make the first small steps into a new cloud-centric world. You can test the waters by investing in new cloud-based technologies, without being all-in.

But hybrid IT can also open up the door to a whole new world of possibilities, enabling businesses to operate in- and therefore reap the benefits associated with- both on-premise and cloud environments.

The best of both worlds

Traditional IT or cloud technologies… it used to be a one-stop choice that organisations had to make. And once you made it, all your application workloads and databases were assigned to one environment. You were effectively tied into that environment until you actively decided to change and, with significant effort and probably financial cost, you made steps to convert.

But, by using hybrid IT, organisations no longer have to commit to a single environment. They can have the best of both worlds and benefit from aligning specific workloads and applications to specific platforms. hybrid IT grants:

The scalability and cost efficiency of cloud technologies

There’s no doubt about it, scaling a traditional infrastructure can be very expensive. By making the most of hybrid IT- and utilising the public cloud and private cloud environments, businesses can upscale IT operations quickly and at minimal cost – which is particularly useful for shorter-term projects. But, it doesn’t stop there… with hybrid IT, organisations can also downscale their operations. In effect, everything can be driven to reflect the actual demands being placed upon the business, saving both resource and money.

And if organisations are saving resource in those areas, it leaves more room for innovation. The exciting new projects that often have to be pushed aside due to more pressing concerns, such as keeping the lights on, can become a reality.

Hybrid IT is also often used in disaster recovery strategies. In our digital world, suffering an IT outage is every organisation’s worst nightmare. Why? Because the downtime that organisations suffer as a result can have a devastating and lasting impact, both financially and in terms of future reputation. By having primary data copied and stored in two different locations, organisations can recover faster while keeping downtime to a minimum.

Above all, hybrid IT gives organisations the freedom to make their own choices. It merges the best of old world technology with new world thinking. And, just as digital is no longer the sole territory of IT departments, it’s set to infiltrate the boardroom and play a key role in all future business decisions.

After all, hybrid IT is an enabler, allowing business leaders to make the right digital decision for their business, whether that is traditional IT, cloud-based technologies or a mixture of the two.

Contact us to find out more about Hybrid IT and how we can help you leverage it

Over the past decade or so, numerous planning and analytics solutions have come out in an effort to catch up with the complex business environment. Most solutions compete around speed, scalability, visualisation capabilities, scenario modelling and excel integration. Our recent Global CIO survey revealed that analytics is still considered ‘very important’ or ‘critical’ for driving innovation and decision-making across the business.

Traditionally, planning tools have been aimed at the department of Finance. Budgeting and forecasting needs, P&Ls, balance sheets and cash flows have been the bread and butter of planning and reporting solutions. However, this only scratches the surface of what can be achieved in the world of business planning. We are in an era when a truly successful planning practice is not solely based upon financial-focused analytics, but also includes customer, sales performance and workforce analytics.

Planning and analytics for the entire business

Although Finance is usually the right strategic area to begin implementing any planning solution, it should just serve as a starting point. A truly successful planning solution should incorporate your operational planning, giving you a more accurate and all-encompassing view of your business.

Apart from Finance, almost all business functions can benefit from agile planning processes and data analytics with payroll, sales and asset management at the top of the list.

Payroll analytics to decrease manual work

Payroll planning can be a very complex and frequently it’s a manual task for modern organisations. HR employees responsible for payroll face multiple components that influence the complexity of the payroll process, such as NI adjustments, complex bonus schemes, salary increases and benefits. Taking into consideration ongoing government changes, regulatory updates and HR related modifications, payroll can prove to be a stressful and time-consuming process.

The most effective way to evolve a historically manual process and increase the speed and accuracy of payroll planning is through data. By taking advantage of analytics, you can create timely, reliable payroll plans to put employee and business insight into action. You can benefit from faster processes and a uniform view of the data and simplify analytical processes, that HR employees might not be able to execute.

Accurate sales forecasting with planning analytics

Sales is another department of an organisation that can greatly benefit from planning analytics. For most organisations, sales planning and forecasting is their life-blood – as it directs the efforts of each department and helps define the overall strategy. Therefore, it is crucial to set realistic and accurate targets based on existing data.

With agile planning and analytics, businesses today can forecast sales volumes and adjust cost and price centrally to see the bottom line impact of the Sales department. More than in any other part of the organisation, this is the ideal area to take advantage of seasonality forecasting, what if scenario modelling and phasing. This will result in successfully steering sales activities, maintaining margins and delivering value, both to the client and the business.

Asset Management simplified through planning analytics

Often the biggest hurdle that companies face when managing their assets is the volume of data that needs to be collected, analysed and maintained. Increasing cost pressure, complex structures in supply chains and rising risks due to complex procurement mechanisms are just part of the challenge for modern businesses.

Effective and flexible networking of data is crucial in order to make fast and accurate decisions. With advanced planning and analytics, organisations can apply profiles to the assets to plan for depreciation and asset control.

At Logicalis, we have a holistic approach to planning analytics, moving beyond finance and helping you take data-driven decisions for the entire business.

What is your approach to Digital Transformation and is your business structured for it?

All modern companies are looking at digital transformation, and the key decision they need to make is whether to “become digital” or to “do digital”. “Becoming digital” is deciding to turn the whole business or business unit digital, re-engineering from the ground up to take full advantage of the benefits of technology across the value chain. “Doing digital” implies taking specific processes, maybe a customer interaction or a B2B transaction process, and making it digital. Depending on which of these options a business chooses to take, the approach and qualities of the Digital Transformation function will change.

Digital transformation has grown as a concept over the last few years, but in general, is taken to mean building additional business benefit on the data and data processes that a business owns. This can mean finding efficiencies through process improvement and automation, new opportunities buried within the value of corporate data or new digital routes to market. A full transformation embraces all of these and more; the emergence of a connected environment, now known as IoT, is opening new opportunities with every technological development.

Becoming Digital: starts with a solid digital business culture

If a business has chosen to “become digital”, the leadership team needs to embrace the objective and fully support the change initiative. That said, the scale of investment and impact of the programme means that a single point of oversight is essential. In some businesses this might fall to a CIO, in others a Chief Digital Officer, however, these leaders will need support from a team with excellent project and technical skills. In addition, the cultural change will require consideration throughout the process. Probably the most critical attributes that the transformation leaders will need to have are a clear vision of what digital looks like, the skills to understand how it will be delivered and, most importantly, the drive to sustain a multi-year transformational programme.

In many ways, the Digital Transformation Officer will have to lead the senior team through this programme, and these qualities combined with the soft skills to enable this leadership will eventually determine the success of the programme. This role is well suited to an interventional style – enabling the business to focus on BAU while the digital programme is delivered in a defined manner. There have been well-publicised initiatives similar to this in major UK retail banks and across industries, like the airlines, where all aspects of customer interaction have become fully digital.

Doing Digital: requires greater focus on technical skills

Alternatively, if the choice is to “do digital”, the transformation challenge is much more bounded. In this case, the challenge is more to do with having the technical understanding and project management skills to deliver tightly defined digital projects. While these transform the particular process involved, they do not require wholesale change across the business. For most organisations, this will be the chosen option as there is less risk and disruption in such an iterative approach. We are seeing programs like this often linked to IoT initiatives across our customer base.

Clearly the CEO will take a close interest in any of these initiatives, however with the choice to “become digital” he or she is betting the company and as such will want the transformation leadership to be part of his senior team and empowered to drive the vision to a conclusion. In choosing to “do digital”, the CEO contains the risk to particular areas and should use his management team to direct these initiatives through a skilled and technically able programme manager. Whatever the approach, there will be a material cost and the benefits realisation after go-live needs to be driven and measured with similar control and vigour.

As the benefits of hybrid IT have become clear, it has evolved from a temporary state to the chosen environment for many organisations looking to thrive.
Every organisation, regardless of size or sector, has a digital strategy. In fact, it’s hard to believe that IT once lingered on the fringes of business operations and decisions when today it is front and centre – a driving force behind both individual projects and overall business objectives.
And for the vast majority of organisations, i...

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